


Stargazer

by QueenMonsterMouth



Category: Subnautica (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-04-21 11:58:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14284440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenMonsterMouth/pseuds/QueenMonsterMouth
Summary: Like bubbles from the deep, strange thoughts and dreams surface and vanish in the same breath. There is time now, to sleep.What happened to them, after the last gift of a dying titan freed them from their long-kept vigil?





	1. Chapter 1

The blisters burn and itch like a creature squirming under your skin. They no longer ooze sickly green fluid, so the Empress must have been right that this was what the Precursors had been seeking so feverishly.

Her children do not speak to you, but you hold hope in your heart that someday they may.

Your hands itch. Your face itches. Everything itches, and you’ve had to keep your gloves on in the habitat so you don’t tear away the fresh scabs forming where Kharaa had once eaten lesions in your skin. The cough has gone, mostly.

 _Fluid intake recommended._ What a fragile game you play, here on this rock. A game the others on this planet (the Aurora, the Degasi, the aliens whose relics you plunder) had lost. To disease, to the monsters, to the depths that house them both.

The manta in the containment aquarium drifts aimlessly among the soft glow of the weeds at the bottom of the tank, the movement soothing to watch. The mantas have never hurt you. The mantas are gentle, docile. Herbivores. You find that quality more appealing in the company you keep the longer you stay here.

You should drink something. You should get some sleep.

But the bed is lonely, stiff, and uncomfortable. The stars out the window are so bright, so soft, so impossibly far away. It’s easier to stare up at them and imagine a kind touch than it is to stare at a metal ceiling and not sleep.

It’s easier to imagine warmth and happiness than it is to dream of the other Life Pods. Of Bart, and Paul, and Maida. To dream of the ends that awaited them and to wake mourning people you’d never known.

 

-o-

 

The Dunes are as empty as they’ve ever been. And just as terrifying. But the Empress’ children are vast and comforting, and though they do not greet you, you feel elation upon seeing them.

The wound of losing the Empress – of losing the only friend you had here has not yet even begun to scab over, but you are as proud of her children as if you’d carried their eggs yourself. The seamoth hovers nearby, and you float weightless above the sand and watch the trailing tendrils of the young Emperor power it through the water.

It’s a fight to not go back and mourn her body. It’s a fight to respect that she’s a part of this planet now, and that her death was simply the end of her mortal form.

It’s a fight not to sob every time you think of her endless imprisonment, her loneliness, her isolation, and how she bore it so bravely for the children she left behind.

The young Emperor circles above you, then drifts off into the darkness of deeper waters. You watch until the last of the glow has receded to rouse and climb back into your sub.

The roar of a Reaper echoes over sand and through your body like a tide of icy fear, followed by another, closer still. You should have stayed with the Emperor, or returned home! This is no place to linger, there is nowhere to hide that the Reaper will not find you. Another roar, and you push your little sub faster – towards a piece of the Aurora’s wreck, sprawled out on the sand. It’s meager cover, but you’re happy to take advantage of it. You pull your seamoth alongside the wreck and slip in one of the doors, and you see the long shadow of the Reaper writhe across the sand.

You flinch back from the doorway and back into the safety of the shadow of the room itself. You know, reasonably, that the shadows matter little – Reapers can hunt in darkness just like the Ghosts can – but the darkness of cover is comforting anyways.

There’s a sealed door at the other end of the hall – you might as well, since you’re down here.

 

-o-

 

There’s largely nothing here. You picked up some titanium from scanning something or other, a PDA you haven’t yet read. Your oxygen is running low, so you retrace your steps through laser-cut doors back to the Seamoth.

Except, there’s something already there.

Instinct has you recoiling in fear and revulsion, and reaching for the knife in your belt –

A Warper. You’d forgotten they were down here.

It appears to be looking at the seamoth, and is tilted almost sideways to look at the underside.

It looks up at you, magenta eyes glowing with otherworldly light. You tense, ready to flee –

It turns back to look at the seamoth.

You can hear your heartbeat in your ears as you watch the creature. It looks over the sub with what is clearly some sort of curiosity, mandibles wiggling in a manner that might be funny if it weren’t terrifying. It’s strangely beautiful, up close. The vivid colors, the graceful tendrils, the almost delicate way it folds its spiked arms to its trunk. Its body is such a fine blend of machine and creature that you couldn’t fathom what it might have looked like as a purely organic being. You’re not sure you would recognize the source material anyways, who knows how far removed this creature is from the genes that made it?

It turns to you once more, and again you brace. There’s no way out behind you, you won’t make it to the surface in time. Your only hope is the seamoth.

The creature is not attacking you. Is this some sort of fluke? Is it trying to lull you into a false sense of security?

30 seconds of oxygen remaining.

Now or never. You dive forward, knife in hand and the Warper lets out a booming cry, crossing its spiked arms in front of itself and immediately a halo of light erupts around it –

And it’s gone. You’re in the seamoth unharmed. You’re speeding away towards home when you chance a look behind you.

The creature hovers over the wreck, looking up at you. It seems to hold your gaze, but after a moment it turns and floats down, back into the wreck.

The day has granted you enough luck, you think. Time to head home before you waste it.

 

-o-

 

The Enzyme. The sting of a thick needle. The gun falls. The building’s lights flutter, dim, and die.

The Enzyme, you think, watching a rabbit ray zip by outside the window.

You’re cured. Your hands still itch and burn, but the scabs are indication that you’re healing.

You’re sitting in the habitat, watching life in the shallows fly by you. You’re cured. There is no more quarantine, no more watching yourself lose weight and watching your skin give way to greenish lesions.

No more cause for Warpers to hunt you. That’s why it didn’t attack.

They’re intelligent, this you know. You’ve heard their crackling voices over the comm, listened in terror as they designated you their prey. But despite knowing both this and what scans of their innards in the fortress have told you, you know little else. Do they remember what made them? Did they watch their creators die? Do they feel pain, feel sadness?

Do they feel anything at all?

It’s a bad idea to entertain curiosity about them.

 

-o-

 

This is a bad idea.

You sit in the seamoth outside the wreck, ears straining to hear distant cries of leviathans – nothing. The sea is calm today.

You’ve yet to determine if this is a good or bad thing.

The stillness is almost eerie – you circle the wreck once just so the cheery hum of the seamoth breaks it. Nothing stirs. The wreck sits on the sea floor as if trapped in time, slowly being worn away by the sea and sand, moving from one state to another.

But those are things you’re trying not to think about, so you slip in one of the doors to the wreck and wait in the echoing silence. In the half-light, every distended shadow makes you jump, and you check your six twice before turning a corner.

The wreck is empty.

You end up back where you started, sitting in the seamoth while silence presses in around you. Lady Luck allows you to linger for quite some time, hanging in the stillness, before she gently reminds you that the Dunes are no place to be unwary in the form of a distant roar.

It jolts you into motion, and you move the sub back towards your home in the shallows.

If you see something in the depths, just out of the corner of your eye, you do not pause to determine what it is.

 

You go home. You feed your mantas. You tend to your small garden. You eat. You sleep.

 

-o-

 

 _Will I dream?_ Her voice asks you from the deep.

_Will I dream when I am dead?_

 

-o-

 

You miss it at first – you walk past it a few times between the moonpool and the garden plots, but it doesn’t register until you’re walking back through the hallway towards your alien containment pod that you notice the light on the radio.

It’s been dark for so long, since the Sunbeam’s- you don’t want to think about it. You don’t want to think about that. About the people on that ship. Is this another ship, hailing you? Is it possible?

Your fingers tremble over the controls – you almost don’t want to know. You almost want to keep this fragile flicker of hope in your heart, want to entertain the notion of going _home_. The word is sweet and bitter, and you swallow it back before it chokes you with longing.

You press the button.

" _Playing translated broadcast_."

Quiet falls.

You wait.

The hope flickers.

Silence reigns, unchallenged.

The hope stutters, and vanishes.

You slump down in the hallway, and cry.

You cry until your eyes burn and your grief has been exorcised to the damp, deaf air.

Exhausted and now dehydrated, you stagger up and lean against the wall to steady yourself against still-blurry vision.

You’re about to head up the ladder to the grow beds when you hear it - quiet, almost a whisper.

“Designation unknown.” A series of percussive clicks times the beat of several seconds. “Mode unknown.”

Then, nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

The problem is not the message. The Warpers have spoken words that chilled you to the core even with patchy translation, but this is nothing like that.

The problem is that it _won’t go away_. The red light blinks on almost daily, the same message playing. _Designation unknown. Mode unknown._

It’s irritating, is what you tell yourself. The light bothers you, and the repeated message might be jamming the airwaves and drowning out a possible rescue. It’s plausible enough that you let yourself believe it.

Above all, you _hate_ the delicate, fluttering ember of hope that surfaces each time the light blinks back on – you want to crush it, drown it, kill it until you don’t have to feel the renewed hopelessness when the same stupid message plays.

You don’t want to think about rescue. You don’t want to think about the Warpers. You just want to survive one more goddamn day on this godforsaken rock.

“ _Caloric intake recommended.”_ Yeah, you fucking bet. But to get to the grow beds, you have to walk past the radio. And when you walk past the radio, you’re going to see the light. And when you see the light, you’re going to listen to the message. You know damn well what it will say, but you’re going to listen to it anyways.

But you’re also hungry.

So you get up, and walk past the radio. And see the light, and listen to the message, and feel your irritation swell to rage that you take out on some marblemelons, smashing them on the floor of the habitat to crack them open. It makes a horrible mess you’ll likely be irritated about later, but at least later you will be full of fruit and have freshly planted grow beds.

Later you will be better equipped to handle life, surely.

Later you will be able to not think about the things you can’t handle thinking about. Later you will have a plan. Later you will be well-rested and –

And what? Stop being lonely? Stop compulsively following the Emperors around, stop being sad every time you look at the empty sky? Stop thinking about the Warpers, and how unfathomable this change must be to them?

You’re not going there. That’s the thing you’ve been avoiding. You don’t need to develop empathy for creatures that hunted down your fellow passengers and would have done the same to you had you not been inexplicably and extraordinarily lucky.

So you’re going to put it behind a wall and not think about it.

 

 

-o-

 

 

The problem with walling off shitty thoughts here is that there is precious little to distract you. You’ve used up your little well of courage trying to save your own skin, and you have no desire to adventure once more into the depths of this place any more than you need to. You have food, and water, and supplies enough to sustain you for a time.

The hours of the night have you at their mercy, and they are long and sleepless.

Typically, you’d pace or fix something or watch the mantas, but you’re tired and don’t want to walk to the alien containment pod since it’s past the red light.

So you toss and turn and grapple with your own thoughts.

It’s the Lifepods that breach the swirling din of tragedy vying for your attention tonight, landing squarely on your conscience where you cannot quite evict them.

People in metal bubbles, hurled out into the uncertain beyond, and you had the supreme misfortune of surviving.

_How could things have been different?_

It doesn’t matter.

_What if I could have done more?_

It doesn’t matter.

_What if it’s our fault?_

Doesn’t matter. Not here, not where luck rules all.

For some reason, it’s always Lifepod 7 that tugs at you the most. What a narrow margin of error allowed you to live while 7 died, a tiny huge change that made all the difference.

You roll over and face the other wall.

You couldn’t bear to put glass walls in the bedroom, couldn’t bear to look out into the empty dark ocean knowing what lives there. It’s best to be in a little metal room with your desk and your potted plants and stiff bed and pretend you’re safe, pretend that luck can’t find you here.

 

-o-

 

_What wave fears the ocean?_ Her voice is not unkind.

_You dream of the deep, but you belong to the stars._

 

-o-

 

You wake. You walk by the red light. You listen. You eat. You feed the mantas.

You wander to the moonpool and toss bits of lantern fruit into the water just to watch peepers grab the chunks in their beaks and take tiny bites.

It seems like a nice enough day that you could go visit the Emperors, maybe the one near the Reefbacks in the crag valley. Near the wreck of Lifepod 7, but you’re not thinking about that. It seems as good a plan as any to waste a day, the thought of seeing the young Emperor outweighs any fear of facing down the occasional boneshark.

You wash the sticky juice off your hands in the open water, and put your gloves back on. The scabs don’t burn in the salty water anymore, but you’re still cautious of tearing them off before your skin has healed.

You hop onto the seamoth and tug open the top, dropping into the seat and – and nothing. The seamoth is silent when it should greet you, and the lights dark when they should be lit. You press a few buttons, wiggle the steering wheel, but it remains unresponsive.

Baffled, you hop back out. The habitat has power, the lights are on, the robot hasn’t told you you’re suffocating, and the room is not filling rapidly with water, so it must be in relatively good repair. You pull your repair tool out of one of the hallway lockers, feeling oddly on-edge.

You examine the water in the pool for a moment. A few peepers dart past, but the water is calm. You take the ladder instead of jumping in, the scared animal in the back of your head yelping at every ripple you make.

Underwater, the endless ocean is as blue as it always is. The sun dapples the sand, a rabbit ray glides, unconcerned, over the sand beneath you.

You swim the length of the habitat, check each bulkhead and solar panel. You even swim over to the lava vent and check your thermal power, but you can’t find a damn thing wrong. So you swim back to the moonpool, less on edge but no less puzzled. The base is as intact and fully charged as it’s going to get, but you investigate the battery compartment of the seamoth open to find one very empty ion battery.

You must be going crazy. They charge when docked, right? They’ve always done that. You hold the dead battery like it’s going to shapeshift into something with teeth and bite you, and carefully deposit it into the battery charge station. You pull out a charged one, and pop it into the seamoth. The sub’s lights flicker on one at a time, then power down. For a moment, all is still.

Then, something changes.

A shiver creeps up your spine, the hair on the back of your neck standing up like you’ve licked a power cell, and the prickly feeling spreads from the base of your spine to the tips of your toes until every inch of your skin is electrified. The air feels like static in your lungs, like it’s a living thing buzzing in your throat.

You watch, caught between astonishment and terror as the seamoth’s lights turn on all at once, bright and sudden, and then slowly begin to dim and flicker.

Right before the sub’s lights flicker out altogether, they surge once more, brighter and brighter, more powerful than they’ve ever been before and painful to look at directly. You’re halfway to raising your arm to protect your eyes from the glare when they abruptly wink out.

Your vision dances with spots, but you can still see well enough to watch in frightened wonder as a dim, pale pink glow creeps over the surface of the seamoth, pulses with energy that makes your core tremble with something like awe.

Then it winks out.

The room is still.

Your hindbrain engages, screaming to the forefront of your consciousness, and you bolt from the moonpool’s room.


	3. Chapter 3

As it turns out, later you – now present you – _is_ irritated by the marblemelon guts all over the floor. And, to add insult to injury, you don’t feel any better equipped to handle life.

Your irritation is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that you haven’t so much as put a toe into the moonpool room after the “incident”, and you hate that you feel trapped by your own cowardice, hate that even after peering into the dark unknown, solving a riddle whose answer eluded an ancient alien race, surviving all odds, that this world still has more to throw at you. That it can’t just leave you in peace. _God_ , you just want to get off this rock.

Well – well. You wish that were true. You wish you wanted to escape enough to prompt you into motion, but your will to try has been eroded down to the bloody quick, and you can barely muster the energy to drift aimlessly from Emperor to Emperor hoping for something. _Anything_.

You steal a bucket of seawater out from the alien containment unit instead of walking to the moonpool room, and eat three-day-old boomerang instead of scrubbing the floor like you ought to. Maybe, you reason as you eat, you’re just going nuts. It’s a viable possibility. All the stress and isolation is getting to you, and you’re having paranoid hallucinations. Maybe you’ve gone so crazy that you’ve stopped comprehending language and the robot is trying to get you to sleep by keeping you from using the seamoth.

The kitchen radio’s light is on, and your eye is drawn to the light. The marblemelon-guts-annoyance is temporarily eclipsed by repetitive-radio-message-annoyance, neither of which are enough to prompt you into cleaning. You’re probably got a couple days’ worth of backlogged messages waiting for you to listen to, and the grow room is only one room over so you might as well let them play. You lug your bucket to the grow room and kneel down, picking a few waxy black-and-beige mottled seeds out of the sticky dried mess plastered to the floor.

_“Playing partially translated broadcast.”_

“Designation unknown.” Clicking. “Mode unknown.”

You stash the seeds in a pocket. Had you ever tried to roast these and eat them? They might be good with a little salt, or maybe with a little fruit juice. If you give the fabricator a bag of chips from one of the vending machines, could you get it to make barbecue flavoring? Could you put that on fish?

_“Playing partially translated broadcast.”_

“Designation unknown.” Clicking. “Mode unknown.”

Barbeque fish sounds kind of gross in theory, but you’ll try just about anything to make this stuff taste better. You pour a bit of water onto the dried, sticky melon flesh to soften it, and scrape the bigger chunks off with one of your old Alterra key cards and wipe up the now-pink water with one of the thin, rough towels your fabricator churned out.

_“Playing partially translated broadcast.”_

“Designation unknown.” Clicking. “Mode unknown.”

Vaguely, you feel annoyance rise up for your past self, and it brings the idle thought of what anger management on this planet might look like. Eating anything smaller than you to cope? It’s a dumb joke but it makes you laugh through your teeth.

_“Playing partially translated broadcast.”_

“Maximum -“ Clicking. “- without designation reached.” You freeze, towel dripping juice tinted water onto the floor. “Pulling active agents to –“ Clicking, a noise like an engine stalling, “- power grid. Entering power conservation mode.”

You stand, motionless, drippings from the towel collecting into a tiny puddle at your feet.

There’s a long string of rapid-fire tonal sounds, and then: “ – has relocated to [garbled]. Mode [garbled]: Patrol. Forwarding logs to other agents.”

You’ve left your towel where you dropped it, and crept in to stare wide-eyed at the radio’s red light.

“For fuck’s sake,” you say, voice raspy after, what, months? Months of isolation and silence? “For _fuck’s_ sake.”

God damn it all to hell. This planet can’t give you any peace, can it? You thought you were _done_ with this shit, done with freaky aliens and the freakier shit they left behind. Can’t they just leave you alone? Is that too much to ask? You saved this entire goddamn planet, what more does it want from you? Fear rises on the heels of desperate anger, cutting though like a cold current dredged up from deep water.

Some part of you belongs to this place, now. You’ve given a portion of your life to save it, something you’ll never get back. Part of you will always be here, part of this place. An image fills your mind of your body slowly crusting over with coral and algae, sprouting barnacles and bioluminescence, the thick stain of life slowly creeping towards your heart as every breath you take gives a little more of you to it.

Like waves pulling at stone, like the ruins in the depths, you’ll just be another relic soon. You’ll belong to it so wholly that you’ll be indistinguishable, flesh fueling new life, bones ground to sand.

You’re shaking, you feel like you’re going to pass out. You should sit down but god, what use is preserving this body? It's barely yours anymore. 

You're barely you, anymore. 

You sit down anyways on the cold metal floor. You’re dimly glad you’re in an enclosed part of the habitat, you don’t think you could handle seeing the ocean right now.

 

-o-

 

You don’t sleep that night.

 

-o-

 

You poke your head into the moonpool room. Nothing seems out of order, your stuff is where it should be. Slowly, you creep around the perimeter of the room. Your battery station is intact, your power cells charged. Peeking over the lip of the pool reveals exactly what you thought you’d see – water. Blue as ever, and a peeper zips by, unconcerned. You feel ready to bolt at any instant, hyper aware of every sound you hear, every inch of your body coiled with instinctive fear. You search for a good long while, checking every sensor and bulkhead, running your hands over your lockers and their contents. Even the seamoth sits placidly under your touch, unresponsive and benign. The power cell you remove and inspect, but there’s not so much as a scratch or dent or weird glow on it.

Gingerly, you replace the battery and open the hatch.

“ _Welcome aboard Captain.”_

You flick on all the lights, rev the engines, power down and back up again – it responds to your every command flawlessly, just like it always had. You deploy the sub, and let it sink to the bottom of the shallows, landing with a soft thump on the sand. Had you imagined it? Had you been so hungry, so lonely, that your desperate mind hallucinated some otherworldly event? A hot wash of shame creeps up your neck. Had you seriously scared yourself out of using the moonpool for almost a solid week because you got so overtaxed that your brain made pictures to scare you with? Your cowardice seems so fragile and silly now in the soft blue light of the present. 

You stare upwards out of the clear roof of the sub, up into the moonpool room where the overhead lights are muted and distorted by the ocean. It’s… nice, being back in the water. The habitat isn’t exactly roomy, and you can only do so many laps of the place – you were starting to feel a little cooped up.

You sit, and watch life race peacefully by you.

Rabbit rays dart by the glass, chasing their reflections, and then each other. The sun begins to set, dappling the sea floor in orange and gold. A handful of bladderfish drift by on the current, and clusters of violet mushrooms begin to don their evening bioluminescence. Distantly, a small group of gasopods call to each other. A translucent, jellylike tendril drifts by the glass, its thin purple core pulsing with soft light.

You watch it, sleepily, until it descends past the rim of the glass and out of sight.

And then, as they do, the warning bells go off.

You about bolt upright in your seat, whipping around so fast you feel your spine pop. Floating just behind your sub, the Warper looks right at you with two sets of beady, glowing eyes. _It’s harmless_ , you think to yourself, struggling to push down the terror that makes your stomach churn violently. _I’m cured. It’s harmless._ It watches you for a long moment, and you’re helpless to do anything but watch back. It drifts slowly with the current, tendrils coiling lazily as it examines you. The alien intelligence about it makes your skin crawl – you can’t even begin to speculate on the depth of this creature’s mind, neither machine nor flesh, neither alive nor dead. The long bladed forelimbs are folded neatly to its front, crested head cocked as it pulls its gaze from you to observe your seamoth.

Every instinct cries out to put distance between you and this creature – who knows how many of your crewmates it had killed? But your mind holds you hostage, every muscle in your body locked tight with fear. _No sudden movements,_ it whispers.

The Warper stares for a long, long while, until sunset light tints the water an otherworldly red as the distant dunes fall into evening shadow. It circles the sub, drifting by your viewport with movements so fluid and effortless it almost seems like it doesn’t move its body at all. You face it stiffly wherever it glides, unwilling to be inattentive to its whereabouts for even a moment. Its strange, beaklike mouth parts move occasionally, the framing mandibles flexing and twitching, though the beast produces no sound audible to you through the water and glass. You shudder when its long tentacles brush over the sub, dipping into the gap between the seamoth’s armored plates, tracing the grooved outline of the upgrade compartment, sliding over the glass and metal without so much as a sound.

It seems to favor using its tendrils to explore, and though you know them to be ruthless, calculating hunters, it’s quite clearly curious in a way you’ve never seen them display before. It’s… familiar, almost childlike. It drifts silently to the back of the sub, and though you twist and turn mightily in the cockpit, you can’t see any piece of it. Having it just out of sight puts your frantic heart in your throat and ice in your spine.

A blast of static from the speakers about shocks out of your seat – you turn in time to see the display screen flicker wildly, guttering in and out like a broken television. You watch in horror as your beloved vehicle’s screen blinks out into static and then pops back on to a warning screen, red triangle overlay flashing as a choppy, fragmented message plays over the speaker system.

“ _Alert-t-t: Heavy- Heav- Heavy power drain – dr – drain power drain detec-tec-tected.”_

 _Oh god no_. If the seamoth dies, you’ll have to get out into the ocean with this monster. You jiggle the controls in a desperate bid for control. The battery percentage on the warning screen plummets before your eyes, the numbers scrolling down so fast you can’t even make them out – when suddenly it stops. The display turns off once more, and kicks back on a half-second later.

“ _Power stabilized_.” The sub tells you, possibly the best news you’d heard all day from _anyone_ , and the Warper drifts by the front end of the sub as you access your display screen frantically. “ _Battery power: 50%.”_

You watch, torn between relief and a new wave of trepidation as the creature circles you slowly. It seems – brighter, somehow, glowing core shining like a beacon in the darkening water, luminous magenta eyes watching for one long last moment, holding your shell-shocked gaze evenly.

It then turns, and with a blinding flash of light, vanishes into nothingness.


	4. Chapter 4

The radio stays silent.

You’re not _disappointed_ , per se, it’s not like you were overjoyed to have it lit up every other hour with the same message – but it feels strange somehow. A missing part of the routine you rely so heavily on, perhaps, a silence where there was once reliable noise.

A tropical storm comes and goes, dredging up sediment and clouding the water. You elect stay indoors until it clears, unwilling to test your luck in murky waters. You eat, you drink, you putter around the habitat, you water your plants. You dream of voices, but always forget what they say when you wake, no matter how hard you try and chase down their words in your memory.

A week passes like this, and then another.

You see nothing of the Warper. Not even flashes of magenta out of the corner of your eye.

It should be a relief. It _is_ a relief, you correct yourself firmly, taking another chunk out of a peeper that had been too slow to avoid your grav-trap.

Today was the first day you felt brave enough – hungry enough – to venture out for food that wasn’t lantern fruit or chips, and though you didn’t travel very far, you feel somewhat more confident. There’s something restless in your blood, perhaps unsettled by your deviation from routine, and hunting for yourself has only partly soothed it. It manifests in an itch, just under your skin, the urge to _do_ something, and sitting in the habitat waiting for the storm to pass has done nothing but aggravate it.

The fact that the alternative to keeping your physical body in motion is lying awake in the darkness letting thoughts about a future you’ll never see rattle through you like a hollow drum is something you’d rather avoid thinking about entirely. So naturally, you let the urge pull you away from the drag of inertia and out into the unknown.

You load the seamoth up with food, water, and vortex charges, and hop in.

As soon as the ocean envelops the little vehicle, you feel your anxious tension dissipate some, which boots your mood immediately despite the hazy water. Turning the seamoth’s nose to the south, you set out into the morning sun.

 

-o-

 

Perhaps your first clue should have been the absence of fish. The Grand Reef usually has multitudes of tiny minnows and other such miniscule fauna, but the dim waters are almost unnaturally empty. The noon sun hangs above you, but does not reach these depths, and the sea is lit by the region’s bioluminescent plant life.

Despite this, and the cloudy water, your good mood does not dissipate. You whistle a cheerful tune to fill the eerie silence as the seamoth chugs along. Normally you prefer to hug the rocks along the bottom of the water, but the sediment there is too thick to see well and you’d rather not rely on the sub’s sonar to guide you the whole way to the Reef.

The first nagging sense of unease comes when you can’t find the region’s resident Emperor. Usually the creatures follow a fairly predictable path, moving gracefully through their chosen biomes and happily filtering microorganisms from the warm, rich waters.

This one, however, is nowhere to be found. _Did it drift into the dunes?_ Perhaps it’s merely visiting its sibling.

You have a compulsion you recognize as being very human – a compulsion to name them as if they were your own family. But they are not human, and the Empress did not name them, so despite the urge to do so, you leave the Emperors nameless.

It’s hard to tell if you do it out of respect for the Empress, or a selfish longing to be in their good graces.

Wouldn’t do them any good anyways – your name certainly does nothing for you here. You might as well have lost it when the Aurora tumbled from the sky and spilled you into the water.

Your good mood has been dampened somewhat, and you bring the sub to rest on a flat stone outcropping and shut the engines down, pulling out a bag of snacks and some cured boomerang. After food, you’ll head to the Dunes, you promise yourself. You’re not willing to go home until you find your missing Emperor. Selfish or not, you _care_ about them – you’ve cared about them since before they were born, and despite their immense size, you feel more than a little bit responsible for them.

Just beyond the crest of the jutting rocks beyond where the seamoth rests, the darkness of the crater’s edge looms, and with it, something you hadn’t considered – perhaps they simply moved on. The Emperors don’t seem to draw the ire of the other leviathans, and they seem to coexist rather well in the biomes they share. Perhaps they, like the Ghosts, naturally leave the place of their birth and drift out into the unknown. Perhaps there are other craters like this one that can support a wealth of life, and perhaps when this one gets a bit too cramped, they’ll find another to inhabit.

The thought makes something tighten in your chest. If they leave, the last thing you love on this planet will be beyond your reach.

Your gaze rests on the tiny window to the open ocean beyond, glassed over as you chew your food without tasting it. Lost in thought, you look out into the dark water, and watch unseeing as something in the gloom begins to stir.

The sinuous motion catches your attention as the soft glow of a Ghost weaves delicately through the water of the dead zone, a sight that makes your heart quicken despite the considerable distance between you. You dump the remainder of the chips into your mouth, heedless of the shower of crumbs that now dust your seat. Lady Luck was good enough to send you a warning, and you’re not about to take it for granted.

You grab for the wheel, preparing to fire up the sub and make a speedy escape for home when the cockpit is suddenly a whole lot darker than it was before. You freeze, hand inches away from the control panel, and chance a look skyward.

Silhouetted against the meager sunlight above is the unmistakable form of a Ghost bigger than any you’ve ever seen.

The creature’s armored crest is easily wider than your long-unused Cyclops is long, and littered with scars longer and thicker than your whole body.

You pray to the only god who will hear you that your luck holds, and the beast passes by without seeing you. It seems to take an eternity to pass overhead, the beast’s body impossibly long – but as its bulk begins to taper off, a hint of wonder cuts through your instinctual fear. The Ghost’s abdomen is unmistakably swollen. You’re in excellent position to get a look at its underbelly as it drifts overhead, and there’s no mistaking the cluster of softly-glowing egg pods tucked under the creature’s translucent skin.

You recall, vaguely, having seen these pods before, clustered in the branches of a luminous tree deep below the surface.

_This must be a mature adult,_ you think, caught between paralyzing fear and breathless wonder. _It’s returning to the nesting ground where it must have been born._ Ready to start the life cycle anew. As if summoned by some unseen signal, other Ghosts seem to materialize out of the gloom, following the behemoth female’s trail, writhing out of the darkness to block out the sun and make their way _en masse_ inland – towards the fissures you know lead to the caves beneath.

Blessedly, they do not seem to notice you.

You sag back into your seat as slowly as possible in case movement spells out “eat me please” in glowing neon letters. The Ghosts call loudly to one another, swimming so close to each other that their long bodies brush.

You stare up at them, almost not believing your eyes, mind churning with questions. Do mature adults move in groups? Do they always return to the place they were hatched? Do they have a symbiotic relationship with the cove trees? Are they only able to successfully hatch when the tree is present?

The steady flow of Ghosts breaks up into groups, two or three at a time drifting in from the abyss and disappearing into the rocky landscape.

The sun is falling from the sky, and you’re not keen on being alone and surrounded when night falls – but you’ve got to pick your moment well, or you risk drawing attention to yourself.

_After this one,_ you promise yourself, stroking the wheel anxiously, eyes on the lone Ghost passing overhead, laden with eggs and calling loudly. It’s such a pity they hate you, you think, watching her long tail power her through the cloudy water. They’re exquisitely beautiful in an alien, otherworldly sort of way.

She’s a bit smaller than the others, perhaps a bit younger but no less intimidating. Her crested head dips just below the rocky shelf you’re sitting on, disappearing from sight and starting a slow descent to the caves.

There is a sudden rush of movement, and a terrible, terrible noise.

The Ghost’s body jerks towards the surface, propelled by the sheer force and weight of the Reaper that struck her from below, savage rending teeth closing around the Ghost’s throat. The red leviathan’s mandibles close inwards like a death knell, but the Ghost is not so easily beaten. A broken, heaving bellow sounds from her tattered throat, and she twists her sinuous body towards her attacker, her massive tail winding around the Reaper’s head and holding fast.

The Reaper jerks away, releasing its grip as it roars and thrashes, but the Ghost has her coils just behind its mandibles, and it cannot shake her loose. Through the plume of bile yellow blood, the Ghost’s upper body curves in on itself, folding up like a snake poised to strike, and uses the force of her whole body to wind up and bash the Reaper with her crest, hammering into its face with a force you can feel even through the water between you. The Reaper squeals, mouth open and black eyes bulging, and the Ghost strikes it again. The Reaper’s mandibles buckle under the pressure of the blow, snapping backwards towards its flank. The beast snaps its great jaws, twisting its body downwards and scraping the Ghost’s prone body against flat, craggy rock – the one you’re resting on. Terrified beyond reasoning, you shrink away from their struggle as if it will save you, panting in terror as the behemoths clash in front of your eyes.

The rock gives the Reaper the leverage it needs to catch one of its hooked front fins into the Ghost’s translucent flesh, releasing a fresh cloud of blood into the muddy greenish water. The Ghost doesn’t seem to notice, reeling back and bashing the Reaper again, bony crest slamming into the Reaper’s open mouth. The Reaper jerks back, stunned, a new plume of blood rising from its open mouth – and for a moment, it seems the battle is won. The Ghost reels back in, preparing to ram the Reaper again and deal a final blow, when another set of jaws find purchase on the far end of her crest. Another Reaper has risen from the murky deep of the Reef, vicious teeth digging jerking her head to the side, and her final strike slides harmlessly through the water.

The second Reaper bellows, thrashing its head from side to side and carrying the unfortunate Ghost with it, shaking her like a dog with a toy. The water around their titanic struggle is tinted vivid green with yellow blood, the cloud quickly engulfing your sub. Seized with panic, you desperately jam the seamoth’s controls, and the engines roar to life – but not fast enough to carry you out of danger. The first Reaper seems to regain its senses and thrashes back to life, pulling free from the Ghost’s loosened coils and whipping itself around to strike at her unprotected belly. The beast’s red tail slams into your sub, knocking you backwards into a rock shelf, and you feel something in the hull crunch with the force of the blow, a thin stream of water running down the inside of the seamoth’s hatch.

Your head meets the headrest with enough force that you see stars for a moment, but your body is high enough on adrenaline to wrest control away from your dazed brain and frantically jerk the little sub into motion, jettisoning you as far from the conflict as possible.

You make it about fifty feet or so before your brain re-engages, and you shake your head to clear the spots from your vision and spare a glance behind you. The Reapers have nearly disemboweled the Ghost, and even as you watch, her mighty body sags towards the bottom of the sea, struggle fading from her exhausted form.

For a moment, you feel sorrow for the Ghost and her unborn brood.

You right yourself in the cockpit, and take a deep breath as your sub scoots homewards. At least you’re out of immediate danger.

Except, Lady Luck has other plans for you.

A roar is your only warning before the seamoth is struck from the side, and your head hits the glass of the viewport. The sub spins through the water, alarms blaring. You struggle to right the vehicle, wrenching the wheel and coughing as water sprays in through the cracked glass. The alarms abruptly cut off, and the lights in the sub flicker once, twice –

And die, without further fanfare.

“Not like this,” you whisper, anguish wringing your heart. “ _Please,_ not like this.”

Again the sub is rocked, from below this time, and you raise your eyes from the control panel to stare down into the open maw of a Reaper that’s closed around the front of the sub. You struggle with the hatch, you know you have precious seconds before the hull gives out and you’re crushed by the creature’s cruel jaws -

Through your dizzy horror, you see a flash of magenta out of the corner of your eye –

A pink vortex surrounds your prone form -

A nauseating stretching, pulling, spinning sensation –

You’re falling through the air, and have only enough time to realize it before you hit the water back-first with enough force to stun you.

Water rushes in from all sides, and consciousness rushes out.

 

-o-

 

The first thing you see is stars, high above you in a wine-dark sky.

You’re cold. Your head hurts like someone took a bat to it. You’re shivering, and that makes the headache worse.

Trying to sit up is a mistake – you retch violently, body protesting being vertical with such vehemence that you’re forced to lie back down, but you’re able to see two things: One, you’re on an island. You’ve been here before, it’s the floating island above the Grand Reef. Two, you’re lying on the rocky shore just beyond the tide line, and about five meters out into the surf, the spectral form of a Warper floats just under the surface of the waves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have quite a few theories about the Ghost life cycle and about Reapers as opportunistic predators! If you have feedback you'd like to share with me directly, you can always contact me on discord all-eater#8631


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